No more Mr. Nice President. For a brief few weeks this spring, the president was on what was universally, and rather uncreatively, described as a "charm offensive." But a series of high-profile power plays this week show suggest a White House that has either lost faith in the value of reaching out or is simply annoyed at a series of scandal investigations and isn't going to take it anymore. The moves may also reflect a concern that if the president doesn't move to set the tone for his second term, it may end up being defined by Republican-driven scandals. Whatever the case, the Obama Administration has this week dropped the "charm" but is sticking with the "offensive."

The most prominent salvo is the planned appointment of Susan Rice as national security adviser. The current ambassador to the U.N. will replace Tom Donilon, who is retiring. The NSA is a big, important job, and the president has shown he greatly values Rice as an adviser, so the appointment isn't a huge surprise. But there's another reason Rice is being slotted for the post: It's not subject to Senate confirmation.

Republicans in Congress despise Rice because of a television appearance shortly after the Benghazi attacks, in which she suggested that the video The Innocence of Muslims, rather than organized terrorism, explained the violence that claimed three lives. Obama had reportedly been considering Rice as a replacement for outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but the controversy effectively ended any chance she could be confirmed, so John Kerry went to Foggy Bottom instead. The NSA gig is a consolation prize for Rice, but it's also a huge thumb in the eye of Senate Republicans: Their adversary gets a big promotion and there's nothing they can do about it. The appointment is even more of a provocation because it comes as the GOP is still trying to make political hay out of Benghazi.

Meanwhile, a top Obama ally is taking the fight directly to Rep. Darrell Issa, who, as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is the chief inquisitor on the IRS scandal. David Plouffe, a former White House senior adviser and the president's 2008 campaign manager, tweeted this Tuesday:

Plouffe is referring to old allegations about Issa, a California Republican. As a young man, he was indicted for stealing a car and accused by an Army comrade of stealing another; in another case, when a factory Issa owned burned down, his insurance company found evidence that the fire might have been arson, and attempted to refuse to pay out Issa's claims. The parties eventually settled for a small sum. The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza laid the claims out in detail two years ago.

Plouffe's tweet raised tempers. Glenn Thrush reports, "His decision to trash Issa in such a personal way stunned Plouffe admirers who privately fret about poking such an ambitious and unpredictable adversary in the eye, fearing it will only reinforce the California Republican's determination to prove that the orders to scrutinize conservative groups came from high-ranking administration officials." According to Thrush, Plouffe's tweet reflects frustration with Issa in the White House, but was not cleared with anyone there.

Going after Issa like that suggests a political calculation that the worst of the scandal is over, and that Issa has overreached. The congressman is a dogged, combative adversary. But he also looks to be in a weaker position than he was just a week ago. Despite much investigation, there's no evidence so far that the IRS scandal touches Obama. Meanwhile, the press is starting to question Issa's methods and point to holes in his allegations -- which he only exacerbated with ad hominem attacks on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Whatever the result, it's an act of political war.

And finally, there are Obama's three nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court, setting up a showdown on three fronts: the judiciary, foremost, but also the fate of the Obama agenda and of Senate procedure. His strategy of a triple nomination is described as setting a trap for Senate Republicans. The D.C. Circuit Court is often described as the nation's second most important court, because it hears so many key administrative law questions -- including, perhaps, cases that could decide the fate of some of Obama's major legislative achievements. For obvious reasons, the GOP doesn't want to see the president fill those seats with allies. Obama is betting they won't have the courage to try to tear each nominee down individually and block their confirmation, as they did with previous appointee Caitlin Halligan, if they're nominated en masse. And if they do, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has threatened to end filibusters on judicial nominees -- the so-called "nuclear option."

Understandably, Senate Republicans aren't happy. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has described Obama's strategy as "court-packing," a peculiar way to describe filling existing vacancies, but one that captures his frustration. Some Republicans have discussed trying to move seats from the D.C. Circuit to other circuits, which would preserve the current parity between Democratic and Republican appointees on the court.*

Obama's three nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court set up a showdown on three fronts: the judiciary, foremost, but also the fate of the Obama agenda and of Senate procedure.

While the nominations have a clear long-term strategy, they also fit nicely with Obama's provocation campaign. Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, told NPR Tuesday night that court move wasn't really even about the court: "You know, what this is, it's an effort for the president to direct attention away from Benghazi and IRS and AP reporters being harassed by the Justice Department."

And as the Obama Adminstration goes bare-knuckles on Rice, Issa, and the judicial nominations, it also seems to be pulling back on the conciliatory gestures. The Hillreported last week that Republicans who supped with Obama in March are feeling jilted. They were delighted to get some face time with him, but say there's no been no attempt to turn that experience into a real dialogue or political process since then. Given the lack of follow-through, it's worth wondering how seriously the White House ever took the "charm offensive." Even at the time, Carney rather half-heartedly described the meals as proof the president was "willing to try anything." And the political scientists and wonks whose data-driven approach seems closest to the White House's cold-eyed realism were skeptical (at best) that a few dinners could break a political deadlock they see as based on much larger structural problems.

Being willing to try to anything, though, could be politically savvy. After all, Obama had nothing to lose from trying. And once the efforts failed, it would give him political cover to come out swinging. Whatever the strategic planning that led him here, the pugilistic president is back.

* Correction: This post originally stated that Republican appointees were a majority of the
judges on the D.C. Circuit. We regret the error.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.